A Data-Driven Clustering Analysis for the Impact of COVID-19 on the Electricity Consumption Pattern of Zhejiang Province, China

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted electricity consumption patterns and such an impact cannot be analyzed by simple data analytics. In China, specifically, city lock-down policies lasted for only a few weeks and the spread of COVID-19 was quickly under control. This has made it challenging to analyze the hidden impact of COVID-19 on electricity consumption. This paper targets the electricity consumption of a group of regions in China and proposes a new clustering-based method to quantitatively investigate the impact of COVID-19 on the industrial-driven electricity consumption pattern. This method performs K-means clustering on time-series electricity consumption data of multiple regions and uses quantitative metrics, including clustering evaluation metrics and dynamic time warping, to quantify the impact and pattern changes. The proposed method is applied to the two-year daily electricity consumption data of 87 regions of Zhejiang province, China, and quantitively confirms COVID-19 has changed the electricity consumption pattern of Zhejiang in both the short-term and long-term. The time evolution of the pattern change is also revealed by the method, so the impact start and end time can be inferred. Results also show the short-term impact of COVID-19 is similar across different regions, while the long-term impact is not. In some regions, the pandemic only caused a time-shift in electricity consumption; but in others, the electricity consumption pattern has been permanently changed. The data-driven analysis of this paper can be the first step to fully interpret the COVID-19 impact by considering economic and social parameters in future studies.